Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

All the past is here, present to be tried; let it approve itself if it can.

Henry David Thoreau

I have no designs on society, or nature, or God. I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. I love to live.

Gyorgy Ligeti

For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.

Jillian Michaels

The past does not define, you the present does.

Jennifer Ellison

I know people will think it's funny because I've done glamour modelling in the past, but I felt embarrassed about my body and just wanted to cover it up.

Jennifer Egan

It's finished. Everything went past, without me.

Jeff Tweedy

When I did do good stuff in the past, it was because I was able to transcend the parts of my being that weren't healthy.

Jeff Tweedy

It's rooted in things that maybe older people or people my age remember as being rock music. But at the same time, I don't think we're stuck in the past or retro. I think we've tried to push ourselves and experiment with what we can call Wilco music.

Jeff Gordon

I want to force the other drivers to find a way past me.

Jeff Gordon

I don't feel like I've really changed. Maybe I have let people see more of me than in the past.

Jeff Gordon

I thought long and hard about my future this past year and during the offseason, and I've decided 2015 will be the last time I compete for a championship.

Jean Smart

We all fantasize about a relationship we'd like to do over or something we'd like to change about our past. I think there are a lot more opportunities for second chances in our lives than we think.

Jean Rostand

It is horrible to see everything that one detested in the past coming back wearing the colors of the future.

Jean Rostand

There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past.

Jean Rhys

I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.

Jean Rhys

No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us...a difficult moment when you are out of practice - a moment that makes you go cold, cold and wary.

Jerry Spinelli

We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past "weird" and "strange" and "goofy." Her ways knocked us off balance.

Jerry Saltz

Calling a young artist 'great' these days can give one the heebie-jeebies: The word has been denatured in the past decade.

Jerome Hines

Happy is the person who cherishes the precious lessons of the past and lives vigorously in the present.

Jeffrey Kluger

When our culture shifts, it tends to overcorrect, throwing out everything associated with an era we've moved past, rather than saving what was good and combining it with what is new.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Though at this moment she felt abused, abandoned, and ashamed of herself, Madeleine knew that she was still young, that she had her whole life ahead of her--a life in which, if she persevered, she might do something special--and that part of persevering meant getting past moments just like this one, when people made you feel small, unlovable, and took away your confidence.

Jill McCorkle

The silver friend knows your present and the gold friend knows all of your past dirt and glories. Once in a blue moon there is someone who knows it all, someone who knows and accepts you unconditionally, someone who is there for life.

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

Jesse Helms

This bill attempts to make sure that President Clinton is not allowed to do by Executive Order what Congress has declined to enact in the past two congressional sessions namely, to treat homosexuals as a special class protected under various titles of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Jennifer Lawrence

I get photographers hiding in my bushes. We're way past autographs. We're into being stalked and followed.

Jennifer Lawrence

If you don't look like an airbrushed model ... you have to look past it. You look how you look. What are you going to do?

Jennifer Lopez

In the past, love for me has always meant forever, and sure, you still nurse some of those fantasies, but I don't try to force it anymore. I hung on to my fairy-tale ideals for a long time. But where I am now, what I've been through, there are no rules. There are lots of ways it can turn out instead of just one. There are so many different kinds of happiness, not just the one you learned about when you were 5 years old.

Jeffrey Tate

I was told when I went for a life-insurance exam when I was 18 that I was not likely to live past 50, so I refused to pay the premium.

Jean Chretien

Obviously, I would have been happier if Canada had not been conquered in the past by the English, if this part of North America had remained French, but you can't rewrite history.

James C. Collins

It's more important than ever to define yourself in terms of what you stand for rather than what you make, because what you make is going to become outmoded faster than it has at any time in the past. ...hang on to the idea of who you are as a company, and focus not on what you do, but on what you could do. By being really clear about what you stand for and why you exist, you can see what you could do with a much more open mind. You enhance your ability to adapt to change.

James Cameron

Your only competitors are your past achievements.

James A. Garfield

We hold reunions, not for the dead, for there is nothing in all the earth that you and I can do for the dead. They are past our help and past our praise. We can add to them no glory, we can give to them no immortality. They do not need us, but forever and forever more we need them.

James A. Baldwin

The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.